Monday, July 30, 2012

Summer reading

by Dr. Robert Zuber, Global Action to Prevent War

The
UN General Assembly’s mandate for an arms trade treaty (ATT) negotiating
conference expired at 6PM Friday with a whimper more than a bang. Many of
us in the room wondered whether or not Ambassador Moritán had one more trick up
his proverbial sleeve, or one more attempt to transform wariness from some
delegations into adopted language.

There
was to be no more magic on Friday. It was clear to us that some
delegations were willing to run out the clock. Apparently, poll numbers in
US swing states and intense (and largely unaddressed) vitriol from the National
Rifle Association (NRA) and surrogates proved too much for the US delegation,
assuming that it was as enthusiastic about adopting a Treaty as it maintained
in the final negotiating days.

Now
it is time for a short summer break. Many of the ATT negotiators will need
to prepare for their UN Programme of Action on small arms (PoA) Review
Conference responsibilities (to take place at the end of August) as well as for
the opening of the UN General Assembly in September. We’re all tired now,
having spent the past month sitting, listening, wondering, probing, and, more
practically, sitting on floors to negotiate and looking, often in vain, for
translated materials and workable headsets.

Shortly,
the ‘second guessing’ and self-analysis will begin in earnest. What went
wrong? What could we have done differently? What do we need to learn
that can help us moving forward?

It
will take a few days of sleeping late and catching up with other work before
most of us will be able to internalize assessment of the long road to last
Friday. But it won’t be long before we will need to weigh in on next
steps, more specifically the process that can and should be mandated in an
attempt to finalize a Treaty and also the ‘status’ of the draft Treaty
language.

None
of us yet knows enough to accurately and comprehensively outline the learning
curves for ATT proponents going forward. But I think that some of these
learning themes should include the following:

We should rethink the policy of acceding to the demands
of any one member state regarding working methods for treaty
negotiations. The consensus provision turned out to be a burden too
extreme to overcome, especially in this instance as it came at the request
of a member state that would likely never ratify the final product and
whose policies on transfers are already of high quality. At the UN,
states can learn to work with treaty and related obligations, as we've
seen in the case of the International Criminal Court and other
structures. Accommodating a single state’s interests on protocol,
working methods, or content must be addressed with extreme caution.

We should also rethink how we ‘sell’ the ATT to the
global public and avoid generating expectations that put pressure on a
document that was never likely to fulfill those expectations. The ATT in
its most attractive form might have had an impact on diverted transfers
several years down the road. It never was conceived as a disarmament
obligation or as necessarily the ‘game changer’ for the UN system that
many of its loudest proponents claimed. We squandered a lot of
enthusiasm in my view by misrepresenting the potential of this ATT, and
possibly also (if inadvertently) did some damage to the UN’s credibility
on security issues as well.

In a similar vein, the lack of interest in the UN—how
it works and the diverse agencies that address peace and security issues
related to this ATT—was troublesome. The singular focus on this treaty
by many NGOs was rarely shared by delegations. As hard as they worked
on this treaty, diplomats simply don’t have the luxury to ignore all of
the complementary concerns, including gender-based violence, international
justice, and atrocity crime prevention, that define much of the security-related
activity elsewhere in the UN. The ATT never had, and should not have,
the burden of defining UN security priorities. This document, even if
all its loopholes were closed, fairness between exporters and importers
were guaranteed, and human rights language punctuated many of its
articles, would be nothing more or less than complementary support for
other security related responsibilities for which the UN already has
demonstrated considerable robustness. The decision to have the ATT
negotiated at the UN should have occasioned more interest in the
institution (and its many obligations) that was presumed to ‘house’ this treaty
and help frame its responsibilities.

The vast leverage of human
energy to create a mechanism to regulate transfers has obscured a fundamental
problem for at least some of the NGOs who sought to engage the
process. For these NGOS, including Global Action to Prevent War (GAPW),
the mandate on transfers is to eliminate them and not institutionalize
them. While admittedly not always ‘realistic,’ we are committed to ending
the reliance of states on weapons for their security and to free as many
funds for military purposes as possible and to make them available for
social development and environmental health. We participated in
the ATT process in part because the negotiators and implementers were our
partners in disarmament affairs, but also because a case can be made that
regulatory coherence is sometimes a suitable prelude to
stigmatization. Our hope for an ATT is that it provides new opportunities
to stigmatize the staggering arms trade, not to provide new impetus for
its growth. Balancing the strong desire for a minimal arms trade with
the responsibility to provide guidance on a regulation-driven arms trade
process was a challenge with which GAPW struggled.

There
is more, but this is sufficient to suggest a summer assignment for those of us
hoping to restore some ATT-related momentum come fall.

One
final note: The ‘team’ of organizations that made up the ATT Monitor—but more specifically Ray
Acheson and Katherine Prizeman—did their best to provide thoughtful commentary
to diplomats from missions and capitals seeking to find consensus on a text
that was actually worth consensus. As both of these women have made clear
in recent days, the ‘final’ draft treaty language fell short of that standard
at several levels. Should we have had a treaty adopted on Friday, some
truly regrettable loopholes might have become institutionalized. Those who
secretly expressed some relief that this treaty didn’t make it to the ‘finish
line’ have a valid point. The lines defining when a treaty becomes more of
a liability than an asset were certainly in full view here.

GAPW's work on the ATT Monitor was intended to prod, to
inspire, to illuminate, to support. Many of the people who were
negotiating this treaty are longstanding friends of one or more of our various
sponsoring projects and are diplomats trying to do the right thing despite
institutional and national policy limitations. The same is true from the
NGO side, though our limitations have different sources. The issue from
here is not whether or not we are ‘good’ or ‘right,’ but rather how
successfully we can adapt to shifting conditions. For this, more than anything,
we need to keep our minds fully engaged and our expectations in
check. Hopefully, the summer will provide both cognitive and advocacy
clarity on our collective responsibilities under the new political and
negotiating dynamics that started to take shape as the curtain closed on this
chapter of our ATT work.